


It Raineth On The Just

by beer_good



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Community: spook_me, Gen, London, Rain, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 05:52:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8389696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: After the events of "Tabula Rasa", Giles leaves Sunnydale and returns home to London. If it can still be his home after everything he's been through over the last few years. What do you do when you've cut yourself off from those you belong with? And who are those mysterious shapes who keep following him down rainy streets…?





	

 

 **Title:** It Raineth On The Just  
**Author:** Beer Good   
**Fandom:** _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ (season 6)  
**Rating:** PG13  
**Word count:** ~1700  
**Author's note:** Written for the **spook_me**  challenge "[Aquatic monster](http://s879.photobucket.com/user/spook_me/media/Spook%20Me%202016/tumblr_mlwvl7rYST1qhttpto1_500_zps4vc081cx.jpg.html)".  
**Summary:** After the events of "Tabula Rasa", Giles leaves Sunnydale and returns home to London. If it can still be his home after everything he's been through over the last few years. What do you do when you've cut yourself off from those you belong with? And who are those mysterious shapes who keep following him down rainy streets…?

 _You're an old man sitting by the fire, you're the mist rolling off the sea_  
You're a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don't you see?  
\- Nick Cave

**It Raineth On The Just**

_I'm headed back to England and I plan to stay ... indefinitely._

Giles had been back in London for a little more than a week when he got the feeling that he was being followed. November, unsurprisingly, had settled into a long wet drizzle, yet he kept going for long walks, down crowded streets, through the parks, along the river, in clothes and shoes that were up to the job and a proper sturdy umbrella. It was one way to refamiliarize himself with a city that had been his home off and on for more than 30 years but never seemed to be the same place twice, especially since his phone book turned out to be very out of date. All around him, strangers in overcoats hurried on home, shoulders hunched, faces hidden under their umbrellas. London in the rain at dusk somehow looked unreal, as if the jetlag hadn't worn off; as if he was watching it all on television. He hadn't seen rain like this in six years, a grey sheet of water that turned the whole city into a pencil drawing, that didn't so much start as slowly insinuate itself until it occupied everything. When he got back to his rented furnished flat, he quickly changed into dry clothes and poured himself a stiff whisky. He checked his answering machine; nothing. He realised there was still a chill lingering down his back for some reason and poured himself another while he opened one of the moving boxes full of books; considered unpacking, but didn't.

_I hear ya. Stay British. You'll be OK._

It was on the third day of uninterrupted rain, just as it was getting dark, that he realised what that chill down his back was. There were too many people around to say for sure, dark shadows hurrying in all directions, huddled under black nylon. But six years on a hellmouth teaches a man to trust his hunches, even if many of those lessons come in the form of a bump on the head and a few hours of unconsciousness, and someone was definitely following him. Probably from the Council; he and Quentin Travers had had a perfectly civil meeting after he got back ("How nice for you to be your own man again after miss Summers made all that noise to get you reinstated. Americans are fickle, aren't they? No sense of tradition."), and it would be like Quentin to keep an eye on him. He'd be lying if he said he didn't half relish the thought of sending a Council henchman back to Quentin with a black eye or two.

The next day, he took a perverse pleasure in leading them on. If they were following him, they must think he was up to something, and so he found himself tagging along with groups of tourists in full storm gear to hear the history of the city (biting his tongue to not correct the guide on exactly what happened to the princes in the Tower), photographing ancient graves and mausoleums, pacing around famous buildings ... But even in this kind of weather London was just too crowded to recognize any one umbrella among the thousands drifting along with him, and the Curious Tourist angle was starting to feel a little too on the nose anyway. Over the next few days, he started drifting out towards what had once been outskirts before the city swallowed them whole, walking for miles down residential streets beneath Victorian mansions and 70s council estates. He kept his mobile phone in a plastic bag in his pocket, just in case.

_I'm just a phone call away ... if you need anything._

On the fifth day, just before dusk, he spotted them for the first time. Two dark shapes. In the fading light and rain they basically looked like umbrellas with feet, but they were unmistakably following his trail at a safe distance. Well, then. Giles made sure he had both the stake and the switchblade at hand, turned the next corner, ducked inside a doorway and waited.

After a few minutes he walked back to the corner and checked. Gone. There were other people there,going about their day under umbrellas, but the two he'd seen before were gone.

Once he got home, he checked his answering machine (nothing), then poured himself a whisky and called Travers. He wasn't sure what he was expecting when he told him to stop following him if he didn't want his men to get hurt, but Travers gave him absolutely nothing in terms of denial or affirmation. "Perhaps you need a holiday." Giles poured himself another one.

_I could be dead. Wouldn't be much of a change. Either way I'm bored, constricted, I never get to shop, and... my hair and fingernails still continue to grow._

As the days got shorter and colder, he kept seeing them. Always the same distant figures, blurred by the rain and almost entirely hidden beneath large black umbrellas; two or three at a time, trudging down the same old streets as him, seeming to fall more into step with him with every passing day, but never getting close enough for him to get a good look. Obviously not the Council's thugs, then. Back at the flat, he dug out old journals from one of the still-unpacked boxes and went through old lists of friends and enemies (they overlapped more than he'd like); quite a few he could imagine cursing him, or attacking him, but this incessant shadowing, long after it must have become obvious that his long excursions had no goal, no purpose... ? None of it rang a bell. He tried to search the newspapers for mysterious disappearances or deaths, but a city of eight million has no need for supernatural explanations when people go missing. He checked his phone, it worked perfectly. He dialed Buffy's number but hung up before it started ringing.

_I can't do it ... without you. I need your help. I need you to be my Watcher again._

One evening after he had somehow managed to lose them again, he popped into a pub to warm up (The Gatehouse, est. 1814, looking like every other franchise pub). Two whiskies later, he decided that this was ridiculous. He'd faced vampires, demons, hellgods, and high school principals; whoever or whatever these things were, it was time for him to stop faffing about. Outside, it was completely dark and the rain was pouring down even harder than before. He splashed his way in ankle-deep water up towards Hampstead Heath, glancing behind him every few hundred yards. When he saw them - three grey shapes, almost disappearing in the pouring rain even as they passed beneath a lamp post - he tossed his umbrella aside, closed his fist around the stake in his pocket, turned around and kept his eyes fixed on them as he walked right up and pushed up the umbrella of the one in front to get a good look at him. "Right then, care to explain why you're following me?"

He'd already got the words out when he realised that the thing he was pushing at didn't feel like an umbrella, but something that was at once much more solid and strangely foggy, as if it were only _mostly_ there. He involuntarily took a step backwards, the rain pouring in his eyes. Definitely not an umbrella, he realised as he saw the thing underneath, saw all three of them in the headlights of a passing car. What he'd mistaken for an umbrella were wings, no, arms, held up against the rain for so long that they'd stiffened into a leathery dome above their heads, drooping down around their bodies. In the shadows he saw eyes that didn't blink, mouths that were little more than holes, tatters of clothes; he couldn't tell if they were animal skins or tattered uniforms or the remnants of an old suit. Even with their strange headgear they were soaking wet, water _(the rain, drained marshes, rivers long since hidden underground, sunken ships, steam engines, flooded trenches, leaking overcrowded boats, the rain)_ pouring off every rotting joint of what had presumably once been a human body.

"Following you?" He couldn't say which one of them had spoken, or if it had been all of them. The voice was a cracked whisper, but still loud enough to reverberate, and only later did he realise that what they were speaking wasn't, technically, English. Or rather it was some strange form of it, that he couldn't have written out without a combined Celtic-Latin-Saxon-Norman-English (and a hundred more besides) dictionary, but somehow he still understood them. "We are not following you. It is you who are walking our path."

They lurched forward again and Giles almost pulled out the stake, but there was nothing malicious in their movement; they were just continuing on their way, glancing after him in what seemed almost an invitation. One of them still wore the remains of old boots, worn down to almost nothing. For a second, the pavement seemed to melt away, revealing cobblestones, macadam, gravel, dirt.

"Wait." He stepped in front of them again. Wandering spirits, now this he knew. "Can I ... help you?"

They looked at him, and he felt struck by the weight of centuries, millennia of being lost. "We need no help. We are going home." They put their heads down and shuffled past Giles, the rain spattering on their domes, to keep looking for homes that had long since turned to dust.

Giles kept watching them until the darkness and the rain running in his eyes swallowed them. From only a few steps away, they looked like anybody. He looked around in vain for his umbrella, pulled his collar up and walked towards the nearest tube station. He was soaked to the bone. All around him were people, bodies, shapes hurrying through the rain towards ... He didn't look closely at any of them. He didn't want to look too closely at them. See someone lose their way.

_It is you who are walking our path._

When he got back to the flat, he changed into dry clothes and sat for a long time, staring out the window at a town he wasn't sure he'd ever belonged in. He sat there, hoping for the phone to ring, as the rain receded and the first wet, dirty snow started falling outside.


End file.
